Gaming on Linux
Ever since the advent of Steam for Linux, performance issues have miffed gamers; especially those who are using Ubuntu’s Unity and are forced to use Compiz as their display compositor. Those issues have been combated in several ways. Nvidia and AMD have been ‘stepping up to the plate’ so to speak with increased performance from their drivers, and developers have been working towards more granular performance enhancements geared towards playing well with Xorg. Step one for most users is to simply unset Compiz for fullscreen applications, KWin for KDE users. The former is the most affected, and that was the catalyst behindMichael Bethencourt’s FSGamer.
So what is it?
FSGamer is a simple concept, that is “sloppily written, and may crash everything and make you cry” — so says the author. What is does is start a seperate X session with Openbox, and then launch the game. By default it uses tty8, though that could probably by changed. A quick ctrl-alt-f7 will get you back to your usual login session. What to give it a try?
Installing
Among items on the to-do list is to have the Debian package call out the the proper dependencies, but for now, it doesn’t. Here is what you need?
sudo apt-get install openbox espeak
Then, simply gove yourself the sufficient rights to fire up an additional Xserver on another tty.
sudo cp /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config.backup
Now, edit your Xwrapper config file. Change this line:
allowed_users=console
to
allowed_users=anybody
Now, let’s allow audio in your seperate Xsession:
sudo usermod -a -G audio $USER
Then, install the deb package.
wget https://bitbucket.org/michaelb/fsgamer/downloads/fsgamer_0.1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i fsgamer*
Lastly, reboot your system and let us know how it works in the comments section. We’d tell you, but we haven’t tried it yet. But we did streamline the install instructions just a little bit from the instructions mentioned on the site.
What next?
Launch the FSGamer application and import your games. The FSGamer application acts as a launcher for each game. It also offers the ability to run custom commands, so you can really run just about anything you want to. More details on usage can be found here.
Reblogged from: thepowerbase.com
